Card Spotlight: Psychic Spiral

For a while, one of my friends kept asking me to add cards to my cube that mill opponents. Mill is also one of those archetypes that keeps popping up on different forums. People love their mill.

Traditionally, there have been 3 kinds of mill decks: control decks that win the game by locking it up and slowly grinding away at the opponent's library, a sort of burn-style mill deck that plays multiple mill spells to burn the library away as fast as possible, and different combo decks that use a one-shot mill spell or big draw spell to finish the game.

Let's call them control, aggro and combo mill.

Including mill as a win condition brings multiple problems. Control mill is slow. Both aggro and combo mill decks are faster, but are parasitic. To function, they need a critical mass of certain spells (mill spells and rituals/free spells, respectively) that do not go well into other decks.

So, for mill to work, you basically need a card that 1) can mill someone out on its own, 2) doesn't need multiple unplayable set-up cards that only work with it and 3) doesn't take 10-15 turns to kill. Oh, and preferably it's not too fragile.

Psychic Spiral checks all the boxes above, while also having fringe use in attrition based matchups as a way to shuffle your graveyard back in. The best part is that you can build a Psychic Spiral deck in 2 completely different ways (or let them overlap):

Control with Psychic Spiral as a finisher
With Psychic Spiral, you have a card that can finish the game without being vulnerable to creature/enchantment/artifact removal. It works best in a spell-based control shell (in contrast to a permanent-based control shell) that naturally puts cards in your graveyard. You can basically fill your deck with removal, counterspells and card draw. Usually, it ends up as either U/R, U/B or U/r/b with a couple of sweepers.
Example deck: U/R Control

Psychic Spiral combo
If your cube has any cards that support other graveyard archetypes (Reanimate, Spider Spawning, Psychatog) or synergies (delve, dredge), you can draft Psychic Spiral combo. Pick up all the cantrips, self mill, looting, etc you see and start churning through your deck like a madman. The great thing is that all the aforementioned both help to fill your graveyard AND dig towards Psychic Spiral. If possible, you want to run 1 or 2 cards that can get Psychic Spiral from your graveyard when you mill it.
This deck feels a little like storm combo in traditional cubes (without having to run storm-only cards!), and can be U/R, U/B, U/G or a combination of those.
Example deck: U/G Spiral Combo

Psychic Spiral has turned into one of my favorite cards in cube over the last year or so. With the inclusion of a single card, we've inserted decks that feel very different that most other decks.
It's one of the best control finishers available to peasant cube, and one of the best linear combo finishers in the format.

If you like the idea of mill as an alternative win condition and/or love spell based combo in cube, I'd really recommend trying out Psychic Spiral.